Link availability improvement using site diversity for high altitude platform station in Malaysia

Link degradation due to rain fade is one of the obstacles in establishing the HAPS Communication services, mainly in the frequency above 10 GHz. As tropical rain is more localize in nature rather than wide spread. The site diversity is one of the effective solutions to limit the effect of rain fade in HAPS-Earth links to improve the systems availability. This paper examines the site diversity performance under the rainy condition by considering the three earth stations having different rain rates at different locations within a specific rain cell. The study is based on ITU-R model to provide a method for predicting the rain attenuation statistics for HAPS linked to an Earth station. Carrier to Noise density ratio (C/N0) is computed to analyze the impact of site diversity fade mitigation technique and it is specified that the link availability is improved from 97% to 99.9% using site diversity.